Tokyo Trip #2: Apartment

Our friend Dan's Japanese cousin, Harumi, graciously helped us get an apartment for the week in the trending area of Shibuya. The apartment was a short 4 minute walk from Shinsen subway stations but it also ended up being only about 10 minutes by foot to the much larger and better connected Shibuya station. Chances are that if you've seen a photo of a bustling Tokyo street it might have been right outside Shibuya station. We ending up using the closer Shinsen station only twice. Shinsen would be a great area to live. Every day we walked by many nice resturants and bars (more on those later) and there was also a good sized market.










Our apartment was small but quite comfortable. Actually it was small by US standards but fairly typical of a Tokyo apartment. As a general rule, it's important to distinguish Tokyo from the rest of Japan just like New York standards of living must be distinguished from the rest of America. It was far better then either of the previous places I had lived in while working in Japan. We even had our own clothes washer.
It was such a bonus to have an apartment instead of a hotel room because it allowed Linda to get a feel for how it is to live in Japan. She's been in hundreds of hotel rooms so that experience would have been about the same as everywhere else. The apartment also ended up being far cheaper then a Tokyo hotel would have been. We were extremely lucky to have Harumi san find it for us.